A tale of immigrant-family history, mystery

March 20, 2005|By Laura Ciolkowski, who teaches literature at New York University.

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

By Marina Lewycka

Penguin, 294 pages, $24.95

Valentina is a bleach-blond Ukrainian gold digger with cosmetically enhanced Botticellian boobs and a preference for the boil-in-the-bag meals and stylish tchotchkes hawked by modern capitalism. When she explodes "like a fluffy pink grenade" into the quiet world of the Mayevskyjs, a family of Ukrainian immigrants in England, Nikolai Mayevskyj and his adult daughters, Nadia and Vera, scramble to control the damage and to manage the war-time shadows and family ghosts awakened by the commotion.

Valentina's appetite for a new life in the West, together with her Brezhnevera hunger for Western goods like a "civilised person's Hoover" and a brown, gas-powered stove (" 'For civilised person, cooker must be gas, must be brown,' " she insists), lead her straight into the wrinkled old arms of Nikolai. With her expiring tourist visa in one hand, her 14-year-old son, Stanislav, in the other, and divorce papers from her agreeable Ukrainian husband on the way, Valentina snaps up her chance for English citizenship by getting herself swept away by Nikolai, her new 84-year-old husband-of-convenience.

Marina Lewycka's comic and dark first novel, "A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian," was inspired in part by her own family history as a daughter of refugees from Ukraine. A woman in her late 50s who, like her narrator, Nadia, is too young to have experienced the German labor camps with the rest of her family, but is too old to hide from the ubiquitous traces of her family history, Lewycka finds humor in the peculiar coupling of a randy old man who wants to turn his war-time survivor's tale into the romantic chronicle of a Ukrainian hero, and a 30-something woman from the old country who lusts after American brand names and designer cars.

Valentina, whose "[n]o-good meanie" husband Nikolai ultimately thwarts her plans for permanent asylum in England despite her willingness to "cradle his bony skull between her twin warheads and whisper sweet nothings into his hearing aid," and Nikolai, the engineer and tractor enthusiast whose misguided fantasies of Valentina as a Ukrainian damsel-in-distress enable him to reinvent the fiction of his own virile power, are an amusing pair of mismatched aliens from the East. It is, however, the competing narratives of history, memory and invented truths at the center of the novel that make Lewycka's story more than a rip-roaring tale of the culture clash between a "painted Russian tart" and a stubborn old emigre who spends his time composing Ukrainian love poems and laboring to complete his great work, a history of tractors in Ukrainian.

Nikolai is an unapologetic romantic who has an intuitive sense of the power of narrative to transform the story of his life as an ordinary man, struggling to survive in Soviet Russia, into a testosterone-inspired hero's tale of manliness and chivalrous rescue. " '[I]t is the natural instinct of man to be the protector of woman,' " Nikolai explains to Nadia in an attempt to justify his marriage. The rescue fiction that has a fearless Nikolai snatching the helpless Valentina from the poverty and crime of modern-day Ukraine is merely the latest installment in his elaborate idyll. The man who, as a young avionics researcher, was so desperate to escape his assignment thousands of miles away from home in a Soviet air force training college that he invented a cowardly fiction that led to the beating and interrogation of his mother-in-law, has refashioned himself in later life as a great protector of his family and his people. Nikolai frequently reminds his daughters, with pride, of the heroic origin-story of his early romance with their late mother, Ludmilla:

" 'I rescued her also, you know. She was under attack from some boys that wanted to steal her skates, and I intervened on her behalf.' "

If Nikolai works to sustain the peculiar shape and character of his carefully edited history, Vera frustrates his efforts at every turn, introducing a competing story into the larger family chronicle. Ten years older than Nadia, Vera suffered through the war with her parents, following them to the German labor camp at Drachensee and accompanying them on the postwar journey to England, where Nadia was born. Vera's unsentimental belief in the selfishness of people (" 'the human spirit is mean and selfish; the only impulse is to preserve itself,' " she says) stands in stark contrast with the poetic vision of life cultivated by her father. Vera shatters the family myth of Nikolai as brave, noble hero by recounting how it was their mother who actually rescued Nikolai from two hooligans who openly threatened his manhood. In Vera's rendition, the young Ludmilla responded to Nikolai's pathetic cries for help as he lay face down in the snow with his trousers down, physically attacking Nikolai's assailants and helping to set him free.